This week’s devotional was written by J.D. Walt and is entitled, Don’t Pray for Wind. Set the Sales. J.D. is the Executive Director of Seedbed.com. We hope this devotion encourages you this week.
ACTS 2:1-4 (NIV)
When the day of Pentecost came they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
CONSIDER THIS
On the the Day of Pentecost, the heretofore impenetrable seam between the Heavens and the Earth collapsed and the realms became a seamless reality. This was not a dissolving of the Heavens into the Earth but rather an interpolation of the realms into a seamless reality.
How do we know these things? We see it all in the biblical text. This was not a quiet, subjective, spiritual happening later adherents could have embellished and later mythologized. This is eyewitness-based, attested history. Acts 2:2-4 and following are not an interpretation of events by later observers and analysts, but a dynamically unfolding account of the ground zero event of the birth of the Church Jesus is building.
The collapse of the seam between Heaven and Earth was sonically demonstrative.
2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.
The collapse of the seam between Heaven and Earth was a visually demonstrative.
3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.
The collapse of the seam between Heaven and Earth was transcendently demonstrative, with Divine personhood entering into human personages.
4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
The collapse of the seam between Heaven and Earth was linguistically, ethnically, and culturally demonstrative.
and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
On this day, an exponentially multiplicative movement launched into the world and for three hundred years astoundingly turned the mighty Roman Empire upside down. The prayer of Jesus—”Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” unfolded in myriad fulfillment from the mundane to the miraculous. There was both sudden fulfillment accompanied by long “patient ferment,” to borrow Alan Kreider’s poignant phrase. It is an oversimplification to be sure, but then came Constantine and later Christendom and Roman Catholicism, a massive split, a mighty Reformation resulting in twenty something thousand splinter movements (aka denominations), a series of great awakenings and lesser revivals and here we are.
We stand in the ruins of the still collapsing facade of Christendom. And all our churches are like so many blind people standing around a massive elephant each with our hand on a different part of the animal and each proffering and preferring a different diagnosis, prognosis and plan.
So what’s the point today? The point is to say the Day of Pentecost never ended. We need not return to the first century church but to restore the 21st century church. This will come by Word and Spirit and the recovery of plain Scriptural Christianity. We must cease fiddling with forms and fads. We must find each other again, not as so many churches but as “Church.” We must cease chasing after phenomenology and begin to run after Jesus on the path of the race marked out for us.
We must meet one another again at the level ground of the foot of the Cross and awaken to the fact the Heavens have been rended once and for all. Jesus is ascended as Lord and King. The Spirit is outpouring in unceasing abundance. We don’t need the Lord to somehow do Pentecost again. We need to awaken to the fact that he is now doing it. He never stopped. The Wind of Heaven is blowing. It is time to reset the sails. We have enough songs and books and bible studies for the next hundred years. We are the most resourced Christians in the history of the Church. It is time now for a great awakening of bold love and courageous faith.
It’s time to stop asking for the Wind. It’s time to set the sails.
Still Day One.
THE PRAYER
God our Father, who with your son Jesus Messiah, fills us with the Holy Spirit, thank you for the miracle and the mystery of Pentecost. Reset our sails to catch the Wind of Heaven that never stopped blowing. Awaken us to Jesus, the Lord of the Church, to the Word and Spirit. Lead us to find one another at the lower ground of the Cross and to open our hearts to one another like never before. Come Holy Spirit, bring us great awakening to who you are and what you are doing in our day. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
THE QUESTION
Do you sense faith, hope and love rising up in you? How might the sails need to be adjusted to catch the fresh wind?
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